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December 20, 2017 at 9:40 AM in reply to: How does one start a petition drive for a CA state “tax reform” in lieu of SALT caps? #808804
livinincali
Participant[quote=spdrun]What if everyone donates to school districts in San Francisco but very few donate to districts in Stockton?[/quote]
That’s why the credits would need to be limited to some dollar amount like Arizona does. Obviously the state still needs to receive money and allocate to various programs and services throughout the state. It could never function if everyone were allowed to dictate what their tax dollars are used for. At best maybe you could convert 10% of the states income tax revenue into charitable contributions for federal tax purposes before you start running into problems.
I just don’t really see the path that high cost of living/high tax state can take to to relieve the sting of this tax bill. It you were itemizing your taxes because of high state tax and mortgage interest deduction and you weren’t already in AMT land you’re getting monkey hammered by this. If you weren’t then it’s marginally better.
In summary upper middle income tax payers in the West and Northeast are getting hosed to give the average middle income american $50-100 extra per month. The corporate tax breaks are going to add $150 billion a year in deficits.
The reality was that upper income tax payers are where the money is so any tax reform was going to hit them the hardest. Under a Clinton presidency maybe the truly wealthy wouldn’t have gotten as much of a break and the middle class american might has gotten more, but there’ no way upper middle income taxpayers weren’t going to pay for it in the end.
Participant[quote=flu]
Yes, I know. This idea sounds totally insane…But hey, we live in pretty insane times, so it probably just as crazy as seeing Trump in office. Write to your leading democrat state representative and propose this to them…Some of them might actually take this seriously…Lol….Taxing our way to prosperity…NOT![/quote]The commerce clause in the constitution probably makes this idea illegal. You’d need the federal government to not step in an try to regulate interstate commerce. You’d also need the supreme court to find you not in violation of the commerce clause when the commonwealth of states trying this inevitably gets sued.
Obviously the large tech companies could be good stewards and do what you describe but Apple makes iPhones in China and Google sets up corporations in Ireland for a reason. It’s not to be a good steward. It’s to save money and increase profits.
ParticipantThe current state of battery technology makes the reality of such a scenario much less likely than being illustrated here. The energy density required to fly a small device other a fairly large range just isn’t there. A tiny throw away drone with a small explosive, targeting and maneuvering hardware probably has a range of a mile or 2 unless it’s designed as a glider that’s being dropped from attitude. In order to execute an attack of this type you have to be in close proximity of the target. I.e. you’d have to fly a plane and drop a bomb of these over the target. Or find some other way of getting them close to the target before activating them. A Nuke would still be far more effective at just pure large scale damage unless of course you’re looking to kill the people while preserving the infrastructure.
ParticipantI’m guessing somewhere in Virginia. Either Northern VA or Richmond.
Participant[quote=FlyerInHi]
People who deny climate change support the fossil fuel industry. But now that renewables have reached economies of scale, the argument is becoming pointless. Countries, states and regions that adopt renewables will enjoy a cleaner environment and faster economic growth from new technologies. Those who don’t will stagnate and be passed over.We are lucky to live in California where we get to enjoy new tech and a cleaner environment whereas other areas of the country provide carbon fuels to power legacy technologies. That trend will be accelerating.[/quote]
You do realize that California imports a lot it’s energy from out of state, and relies heavily on Natural Gas which isn’t renewable. That solar farm out in the Mohave desert might make you think CA is supper green and clean but the reality is they just moved the dirty fossil fuel energy production into somebody else back yard.
Participant[quote=zk]
There is not a single word in that study that says anything about whether the reporting on those outlets is biased one way or the other. The entire study is about how the audiences of those outlets behave. My response to your previous post was that the study had exactly zero to do with the actual reporting by those outlets. If you can show me otherwise, bring it.
[/quote]The study takes people that view themselves in 5 distinct categories. Very left, moderate left, middle, moderate right, and far right. It asks them what their view is of each news network. Those on on the far left had a untrustworthy view of Fox and like far right programming. The far right distrusted most news outlets to the far left. Those in the moderate categories and middle took exception with far right and far left media but most of the mainstream media was fine including regular old Fox news. If that’s not a measure of how the general public perception of bias I don’t know what is.
The fact that you take so much exception with news media on the right probably means you really probably are in the far left category. You might not view yourself as far left but relative to the general US population you probably are. That’s probably why you and some of the other posters see this asymmetrical bias you like to claim. You see yourself as the middle but don’t realize that you’re actually on the far left compared to the general population.
I view myself as pretty middle moderate left on social issue, but far right on fiscal issues, but know know maybe I really am moderately right on social issues compared to the general population. How do I quantify that, since it’s a measure that relative to everyone else.
Participant[quote=zk]
You missed one thing which entirely discredits your claims of bias in the reporting of the Washington Post et. al.
That spectrum indicates the ideological profile of the audience of those outlets. It has exactly zero to do with the reporting on those outlets.[/quote]
If you maybe read the first page of the study you’d understand how it was performed, but instead you didn’t. The funny thing is it specific talks about how those on classify themselves as far left/liberal are more likely to block or ban someone with an opposing view point. Pretty much exactly what you are trying to do here. Let’s ban fox news because they disagree with my view point.
It talks about how people who describe themselves as liberal get information from more sources while the conservatives tend to get there news from Fox. There’s some graphs for people in the middle of the spectrum and they seem to go Fox about as much as MSNBC.
You see Fox as having some sort of oversized impact because all the hard core conservatives/right go there while the hard liberal/left spreads it around the left leaning sites. I agree that there isn’t a dominate left leaning new network that the left all gathers around but it is what it is. Just because the left doesn’t have a fox news equivalent for their view point doesn’t mean Fox is destroying the country. They just seized on an opportunity of people consuming media with a selection bias. Conservatives wanted a news channel that agreed with their view point and Fox came along and gave it too them.
ParticipantHere’s a pew research study from 2014 that goes really in depth to the topic of how people consume media.
Seems like Fox News in general is about as far right as as liberal outlets like Huff Post, Washington Post, etc. but some of the individual programs on Fox News are extremely to the right so maybe it’s not regular old Fox news that’s so extreme in it’s bias. It’s The Sean Hannity show on Fox News and that being equated to all of Fox news.
According the the study it seemed like The Wall Street Journal is viewed as the least biased.
Participant[quote=zk]A fine article from the new York times on the alternate universe that viewers of right – wing media inhabit.
How can you have an effective democracy if the truth doesn’t matter? You can’t. Right wing media have made truth not matter.
Honestly, I think I’m ahead of the curve on this one. I don’t see a lot of agreement with my sentiment that right-wing media are destroying our country. I see significant agreement that they’re full of shit. But not much agreement that they’re destroying our country. I think that at some point, possibly before long, there will be more agreement on that.
Unfortunately, I think that agreement will only be among those who haven’t fallen for it, and that that won’t help much.
If you look at the ratings for the various news programs in prime time the numbers are just too low to have that much influence. Fox news has the best ratings but that translates to an average of about 4 million viewers in prime time. That’s like 1% of the population. I don’t spend much time watching news anymore. I find out information from various sources on the internet and will occasionally end up at a major news outlet article via a link but I’m not bookmarking Huff Post or New York times or fox news as my go to source for information.
The revenue difficulties a lot of news sources are having would seem to suggest I’m not the only one that’s doing this. Therefore how much of the population is really being brainwashed by right wing media. Seems like less than 10% and most of that 10% is really just seeking out confirmation bias. They think liberals are full of it so they seek out people that agree with that belief.
Take something that was big news during the election cycle. The Clinton email scandal and then think about where did you first find out about that scandal. Everybody knew about it but they probably didn’t learn about it because they flipped on Fox news or read the original new York Time piece. They picked up up from social media or a conversation with a friend. What did people primarily take away from that story? That Hilary Clinton was full of shit. Some choose to support her anyway because everybody does it or she’s better than the alternative, but nobody thinks she wasn’t lying. Fox news slanted their coverage one way Huff Post slanted it another way but in the end fox news wasn’t really responsible for formulating peoples opinions about that story. People arrived at their conclusion via other means not because their we’re brainwashed by the media.
Participant[quote=harvey][quote=livinincali]Health care spending is included in the measurement of GDP. If GDP is 15 trillion and health care is 3 trillion of that then reducing health care spending by 1 trillion reduces GDP by 1 trillion.[/quote]
You do understand that government spending is included in GDP?
Why would a third of total healthcare spending just disappear simply because the government is paying the bill instead of insurance companies or private consumers?
Where does this trillion dollars in economic activity go?[/quote]
I agree that if we continue to spend 3 trillion per year on health care then changing who pays that 3 trillion dollars doesn’t do anything to GDP. However everybody here seems to think single payer or some other government fix would be to reduce the total spending on health care, not who pays for it. If we do indeed reduce spending on health care in aggregate then GDP would go down and we’d have a recession.
Ultimately Obamacare really just changed who’s paying to some degree. Overall health care spending didn’t go down because of. It did buy a couple years of a slower growth but recently health care spending is going up at the previous ~6% per year. Obviously that growth in health care spending can’t continue forever so something will happen but I don’t know what that will be. At some point you need to remove some of the overhead and layers of profit in health care and when you do it will effect the economy on the whole.
When we embark on that path it’s going to be disruptive in the economy and it’s one of the reasons the politicians don’t really want to do anything. They are all smart enough to realize a major overall of health care is going to disrupt a couple million jobs maybe more. Trump did get elected in part because people are still upset about that manufacturing job or mining job they lost in the 90’s. We put a bunch of billing coders and administrators and insurance agents out of a job with single payer they are going to hold it against you for a very long time. Will we be better off in whole, certainly, but it won’t be fun for the people that have to deal with the disruption.
Participant[quote=ocrenter]
You do realize you have a huge black hole known as the ER. Where people not covered and not able to afford fee for service will simply allow whatever that ills them to worsen until it becomes bad enough to be life-threatening and thereby the ER can not turn them away.China runs a very good free market health care system. But they allow people that can’t pay for the ER to die outside the doors.
That is a key ingredient in a successful free market health care system.[/quote]
I’m not saying free market system don’t have their consequences. Every system has in consequences to various degrees. In very socialized system you wait a long time for elective procedures or you don’t get them at all. In other system you die if you can’t pay and charity refuses to save you. In our system everyone gets treated and almost everyone has access to the latest and best procedures but at a tremendous cost.
Our system’s biggest problem is it doesn’t allow for free market forces to force competition and drive down costs. At the same time is also has no regulations in place to prevent costs from rising. Every country in the world has decided to either make health care a utility that’s tightly controlled or allowed bad outcomes for some based on free market forces. Neither is perfect but they are more efficient than our current system.
The bottom line is our medical system has a lot of people being paid by health care spending that aren’t actually providing care. There’s excessive overhead in our health care spending. Free market systems prevent excessive overhead to the cost of providing care by competition. Tightly regulated system prevent excessive overhead by strictly regulating everything. We don’t do either so we have millions of paper pushers being paid by health care spending from insurance agent, to billing coders, to various administrative departments and boards.
Participant[quote=SK in CV][quote=Harvey]The argument that we shouldn’t improve something that is obviously very broken because any improvements could theoretically cause a recession is a terrible way to approach policy.[/quote]
It can “theoretically cause a recession” only by using “theory” the way evolution deniers say “it’s only a theory”. There is no economic model that shows a recession is a possibility, much less a likelihood.[/quote]
What are you talking about. A recession is a reduction of GDP by definition. Health care spending is included in the measurement of GDP. If GDP is 15 trillion and health care is 3 trillion of that then reducing health care spending by 1 trillion reduces GDP by 1 trillion. Therefore you have a recession by definition. Now that recession might be short lived once the economy reallocates itself but it most certainly will take some time for the economy to reallocate itself. Even if you do some sort of phase in to single payer the insurance companies and others effected are going to immediately respond by laying off as many people as they possibly can before the policies go fully into effect.
I’m not saying you won’t be better off in the end but as a politician you could lose a election cycle or two until things stabilize again. I’m also saying to don’t see how you can materially change health care spending without causing a recession just because of the way the math works.
Participant[quote=ocrenter][quote=harvey]If efficiencies and cost savings led to recessions then most of economic history would have been a recession.[/quote]
Health care doesn’t lend itself to unbridled free market forces. It is beyond easy to scare the client into doing a whole bunch of expensive and worthless treatments and procedures. In fact, client expectation is the expensive stuff. Efficiency can only come about from single payer forcing discipline in cost control.[/quote]
Free markets could solve a lot but not all of the cost side. For example allowing somehow to open an MRI imaging facility assuming they hired the necessary licensed personal would lower the cost of MRIs but Certificate of Need licensing prevents that from happening. Forcing medical providers to post prices would allow customers to shop around.
Forcing medical providers to eat the costs of their own mistakes would help. I.e. if I elect to have knee surgery for an aching knee if I get an infection while under the care of said hospital they would eat the cost of treating the infection and extra days in the hospital but instead they currently get to charge people for that.
Allowing a business that is licensed to purchase drugs in India or somewhere else where the drug company sets them much lower and re-import them here would drastically lower the price of drugs here. These are all free market forces that would lower the cost of health care here.
Forcing health care providers to post prices and always charge that price would effectively lower health care costs. If you want Medicare patients you bill everybody the Medicare price or you choose not to have any medicare patients. If you can’t make if with the medicare patients or without them because you have a lot of debt or outlays you go out of business and somebody buys your assets for pennies on the dollar and can make a profit at the medicare rates.
All of those free market forces would work to lower health care costs. Single payer is just an alternative to that and one that’s likely less efficient. It would probably work and it might involve slightly less disruption.
In the end though Health Care revenue is a component of GDP. If you lower the cost of health care you’ve lower health care revenue and GDP. By definition lower GDP means we’re in recession. Health care primarily is a service provided by people. If you materially reduce health care costs you are most certainly are either laying people off or reducing their salaries by a material amount. This is math not theory.
Participant[quote=SK in CV][quote=livinincali]
That’s exactly the point and why I don’t see the government ever fixing the health care issue in this country. We’re never going to get to single payer because it would create a massive recession in the short term. [/quote]I don’t buy the recession thing. Wouldn’t happen. Health care jobs won’t disappear. Health care admin jobs won’t disappear. Both will increase. Dramatically.[/quote]
Well then you didn’t fix the cost side of the equation. Why is health care so expensive in this country. Most of the money spent is going into somebody’s pocket somewhere. If we’re spending 3 trillion per year on health care and change that number to 2 trillion via single payer or whatever mechanism you can come up with, that’s 1 trillion less dollars going into some person’s pocket. Yeah the economy will reallocate the jobs and spending over time but it won’t happen immediately. Health care spending is included in GDP. If I reduce health care spending dramatically via some solution or change then I’ve reduced GDP as well.
If what you say comes to pass and we increase the number of jobs in the medical sector how exactly will health care costs come down.
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